How to optimize email deliverability

Now that you’re familiar with how email deliverability works, we’ll discuss how to help you optimize your deliverability rates. In our exercise, we’ll be showing you how to create an email designed for deliverability, set up an email bounce program, and create two email soft bounce smart campaigns, create an email invalid system smart list, and marketable emails smart list, and create an email performance report.

When crafting your email marketing content, it’s important to use best practices to optimize its deliverability. We’ll go over some crucial points to consider. Use a trustworthy and recognizable From name. The From name is the first field that appears in most email clients, so, it’s incredibly important to provide a From name that people will trust, encouraging them to open your email. Use a creative and effective subject line. While there’s no perfect recipe for crafting the best subject line, it is important to follow some guidelines to help you encourage people to open your emails. It’s always best to tell the viewer what’s inside the email, not sell what’s inside the email. Be useful and specific. Keep it short and concise. Don’t use all-caps. Keep it straightforward. Avoid using promotional or spammy language, like free, credit card offer, weight-loss, or order now. Test your subject lines with an A/B test. Use the preheader space. Studies show, subscribers spend only about three to four seconds deciding if they’ll open your email, so, it’s important to get their attention and interest immediately. Get creative with preheader text, and give the viewer a teaser of what’s inside your email. Be consistent and concise. Keep your content as close to the style and messaging that your audience already associates with your brand, website, or social media channels. It’s more important to send valuable content than to send too often with repetitive messaging. And most of all, keep it short and to the point. Balance your image-to-text ratio, and use alt text. Some email clients don’t allow images to show up automatically, which means you need a backup plan for what appears in place of your images. Add alt text to each image, giving the viewer an idea of what the image is about. When using images in your email, it’s best practice to use a healthy balance of both images and text, emails with very little text characters are more likely to get flagged as spam.

First, we’ll create the program that will store all of our email deliverability campaigns and assets. In Marketing Activities, right-click your Marketing Initiatives folder, and select New Program. Give this program the name, Email Bounce. For Program Type, choose Default. For Channel, choose Operational, then click Create. Now we’ll create two folders for our campaigns and assets.

Here, we’ll create a Soft Bounce Clean Up Smart Campaign in the Campaign folder that sets a lower bounce threshold. This is a one-time cleanup campaign that will update an email address to invalid status if it soft bounces three times in 60 days. We’ll be discussing ongoing soft bounce management in the next exercise. Right-click your Email Bounce program, and select New Smart Campaign. Give the campaign the name, 01 Soft Bounce Clean Up, and click Create. Next, you’ll click the Smart List tab, then locate the Email Bounces Soft trigger, and drag it over to the canvas. Set Email to is any, click to add a constraint, select Date of Activity, and set it to in past 60 days. Click to add another constraint, select Minimum Number of Times, and set it to three. Next, you’ll locate the Not Was Delivered Email filter, and drag it over to the canvas, then set it to is any. Click to add a constraint, select Date of Activity, and set it to in past 60 days. Click to add another constraint, select Minimum Number of Times, and set it to three. Now you’ll click the Flow tab, and drag Change Data Value over twice to the canvas. In the first one, set Attribute to Marketing Suspended, and New Value to true. In the second one, set Attribute to Marketing Suspended Reason, and New Value to Bounced Three Times Past 60 Days. Last, you’ll click the Schedule tab and click run once.

In this example, you’ll create an ongoing Smart Campaign within your Email Bounce program that will flag leads that have chronically soft bounced. These leads will be blocked from future mailings, which will improve your deliverability. Right-click your Email Bounce program, and select New Smart Campaign. Give the campaign the name, 02 Email Soft Bounces, and click Create. Next, you’ll click the Smart List tab, then locate the Email Bounces Soft trigger, and drag it over to the canvas. Set Email to is any. Click to add a constraint, select Date of Activity, and set it to past 60 days. Click to add another constraint, select Minimum Number of Times, and set it to three. Next, you’ll locate the Not Was Delivered Email filter, and drag it over to the canvas, then set it to is any. Click to add a constraint, select Date of Activity, and set it to in past 60 days. Click to add another constraint, select Minimum Number of Times, and set it to three. Now you’ll click the Flow tab, and drag Change Data Value over twice to the canvas. In the first one, set Attribute to Marketing Suspended, and New Value to true. In the second one, set Attribute to Marketing Suspended Reason, and New Value to Bounced Three Times Past 60 Days. Last, you’ll click the Schedule tab, and click Activate.

In this exercise, we’ll create an Email Invalid System Smart List to view leads with invalid emails. Start on the My Marketo dashboard and click the Database tile. Right-click the Group Smart Lists folder, select New Folder, and give it the name, Email Deliverability. Now, right-click the folder and select New Smart List. Give your smart list the name, Chronically Bouncing Emails, and click Create. In the Smart List tab, search for the filter, Email Bounced, and drag it onto the canvas. Set the value to is any. Next, locate and drag the Email Bounced Soft filter to the canvas. Set the value to is any. Click to add a constraint, select Date of Activity, and set it to in past 60 days. Click to add another constraint, select Minimum Number of Times, and set it to three. Next, you’ll locate the Not Was Delivered Email filter, and drag it over to the canvas, then set it to is any. Click to add a constraint, select Date of Activity, and set it to in past 60 days. Click to add another constraint, select Minimum Number of Times, and set it to three.

In this exercise, we’ll create a Marketable Emails Smart List to view leads with valid emails. Right-click the Email Deliverability folder, and select New Smart List. Give your smart list the name, Marketable Emails, and click Create. Now, we’ll drag over five filters to the canvas, Email Address, and set it to is not empty, Not Email Bounced, and set it to is any, Black Listed to false, Unsubscribed to false, Email Invalid to false, and Marketing Suspended to false. Then select Use ALL filters.

Now we’ll create an Email Performance Report, to view all sent emails. From the Marketo Superball, in the top-left corner of your instance, select Analytics, and click the Email Performance report type. From the Report Actions dropdown, select Save As, for the Save To field, select Analytics, Group. For Folder, select Group Reports. For Name, call this, Email Performance Report Sent This Year, then click Save.

Now we’ll modify the timeframe of the report. To focus on a specific time of activity, click the Setup tab. Double-click the timeframe field to choose the timeframe from the dropdown, or the timeframe calendar field, to set a custom timeframe that is outside of the predefined values. Click Save. Now click the Report tab to see your report for the selected timeframe, and to review your email metrics for all sent emails. -